aptain Philip as Patrick
O'Donnell's brother, whom she was bound to serve in return for Patrick's
many services to her; and of how unlike Patrick he was. Mrs. Lackstraw
had been apprehensive about her fancy for Patrick. Therefore if Captain
Philip was unlike him, and strictly a Catholic, according to report,
the suspicion of danger dispersed, and she was allowed to enjoy the
pleasures of the metropolis as frequently as she chose. The nursing of a
man of Letters, or of the neighbour to him, a beggar in rags, would not
have been so tolerated. Thus we perceive that wits actively awake inside
the ring-fence of prepossessions they have erected may lull themselves
with their wakefulness. Who would have thought!--is the cry when the
strongest bulwark of the fence is broken through.

Jane least of any would have thought what was coming to pass. The pale
square-browed young officer, so little Irish and winning in his brevity
of speech, did and said nothing to alarm her or strike the smallest
light. Grace Barrow noticed certain little changes of mood in Jane she
could scarcely have had a distinct suspicion at the time. After a recent
observation of him, on an evening stroll from Lappett's to Woodside, she
pronounced him interesting, but hard. 'He has an interesting head...
I should not like to offend him.' They agreed as to his unlikeness to
fluid Patrick; both eulogistic of the absent brother; and Jane, who
could be playful in privacy with friends, clapped a brogue on her tongue
to discourse of Patrick and apostrophise him: 'Oh! Pat, Pat, my dear
cousin Pat! why are you so long away from your desponding Jane? I 'll
take to poetry and write songs, if you don't come home soon. You've
put seas between us, and are behaving to me as an enemy. I know you 'll
bring home a foreign Princess to break the heart of your faithful. But
I'll always praise you for a dear boy, Pat, and wish you happy, and beg
the good gentleman your brother to give me a diploma as nurse to your
first-born. There now!'

She finished smiling brightly, and Grace was a trifle astonished, for
her friend's humour was not as a rule dramatic.

'You really have caught a twang of it from your friend Captain Con; only
you don't rattle the eighteenth letter of the alphabet in the middle of
words.'

'I've tried, and can't persuade my tongue to do it "first off," as boys
say, and my invalid has no brogue whatever to keep me in practice,' Jane
replied. 'One wonders what he